Read Online Beautiful by Amy Reed - Free Book Online Page B

and I love her more than I’ve ever loved anyone.
    We walk quickly to where Alex is waiting. We say nothing. We are closer to each other than we need to be, our shoulders and hands bumping.
    Alex is standing around the corner smoking a cigarette. “How much do we have so far?” she says. Sarah hands her the manila envelope and Alex counts the money while we stand there, our shoulders just barely touching. “Fifty-two seventy-six,” Alex says. “That’s enough for some tacos and weed and acid.”
    We go to the arcade and meet Purple Haze and I don’t sleep until tomorrow.

(EIGHT)
    We’re driving away from school in Ethan’s ’87 Honda Civic and I’m waving like I’m in a parade. People are gathered around to watch us go. There should be streamers, balloons, a big band playing. I am fighting the urge to honk the horn.
    I am riding in the front seat of a car with the coolest guy in school. That makes me the coolest girl in school.
    Alex is waving with that smile on her face like
I know what you’re going to do
, and Sarah looks sad and mousy like
Don’t leave me alone with her,
and James the asshole is there with a look on his face that says
I am such a dumb-ass
, and I want to yell out the window, “Look what you’re missing!”
    â€œWhat do you want to do?” Ethan asks me when we getaway from school. Suddenly, his car doesn’t seem so spectacular. I notice the faint smells of hamburgers and mildew. We are driving through quiet residential streets.
    â€œI don’t know,” I say. I want to keep driving. I want to drive by every single person I know. I want them to squint their eyes and look in the window and see that it is me.
    â€œAre you hungry?” he says.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œI’m fucking starving.”
    â€œThere’s food at my house. My mom’ll be asleep until five.” I don’t know why I say this. It seems like the right thing to say.
    â€œCool,” he says, and I tell him where to go.
    I want to keep driving. I want to go back and get Sarah. I don’t want to go to my house and watch him eat. I don’t want him in my room where he can see the chair I sit in by the window when I’m alone, where I sleep, where I lie on my back and look at the ceiling. I don’t want to be alone with him.
    This is what he meant by “I want to get to know you better.” This is the “alone time.” This is when we pass a joint back and forth and I let him talk and let him think I am interested in what he’s saying. We are talking about the things you are supposed to talk about before you have sex.
    He tells me: “My father is an artist, but I don’t live with him. My mother is an accountant and amateur bodybuilder.”
    I tell him: “My father does something with computers. My mother does nothing.”
    It is the middle of the afternoon and my mother is sleeping. She does not know we are here, in my bedroom, on my bed. She does not know his hand is under my shirt and rubbing while he talks. He does not know that I feel nothing.
    I have never met a bodybuilder, but I’ve seen them on TV. I am wondering what Ethan’s mother looks like, if she’s the kind of woman who looks like a man.
    â€œMy father lives in Israel,” he says. “I’m gonna live with him when I graduate.”
    What’s so special about Israel?
I want to say, but I don’t.
    â€œMy mom’s a gentile, so according to Jewish law, I’m not Jewish. I don’t know why my father married a fucking gentile.” He says this as he’s unbuttoning my gentile pants, as he slides his hand into my gentile underwear.
    This is what I know about him: He likes skateboards and hamburgers (no cheese; not kosher). He does not like vegetables or school. He does like beer and pot and nitrous oxide and ketamine.
    What he knows about me is my first name, how old I am, and that I live